Monday, 3 November 2014

In a display of arrogance and disdain for the voters, Bercow's office has destroyed paperwork relating to MPs' expense claims made before 2010. The excuse being that the destruction was necessary to comply with data protection laws.

Unsurprisingly, this means that those MPs accused of abusing the expenses system will escape official
investigation.

Sunday, 7 September 2014

Marcial Boo, the chief executive of the Independent Parliamentary Standards
Authority (Ipsa), believes that MPs do an important job and should not be paid
“a miserly amount” for their services. Indeed, an MPs salary of £67K is way below that of Mr Boo's (who earns £120K).

As such he has authoried a pay rise of around 10%, effective from next May.

Whilst this may be all very well in Mr Boo's well paid bubble universe, in reality it simply cannot stand; lest there be an outpouring of anger from the taxpayers and voters, who are constantly being told by the government to tighten their belts.

Mr Boo will find himself abolished before his recommendation comes to fruition.

Wednesday, 13 August 2014

Mark Simmonds, the foreign office minister who resigned from the Government after claiming his
expenses were too meagre, used the profit from the sale of his
taxpayer funded home to buy a £1 million former abbey in his constituency.

Simmonds sold his home in Putney, South London, for £1.2 million in 2010,
making a profit of more than £500,000.

He used his expenses to claim the mortgage interest payments on the property
for almost the entire time he owned it.

He and his wife then bought Swineshead Abbey in Lincolnshire for £900,000, a
Grade II listed 17th century building with seven bedrooms, stables, a heated
outdoor swimming pool, a tennis court and 15 acres of parkland.

Result!

Having made a nice little pile from being an MP Swineshead Simmonds can now turn his attention to making even more money in the real world.

Thursday, 24 April 2014

When shifting your debt from an institution you no longer want to be associated with, make sure that the institution into which you place your debt is not in fact owned by the one from which you wished to disassociate yourself.

Wednesday, 9 April 2014

Maria Miller has finally resigned her office, on the basis that the affair is proving to be a distraction to the work of her party.

All very well and dandy, as far as that goes. However, she and some in her party have not learned the fundamental lesson from this. Irrespective of whether she really believes that it was OK to only repay £5,800 out of the £45,000 that the independent parliamentary commissioner for standards had previously recommended, the voters do not think that this was right.

Like it or not MPs cannot be seen to be milking taxpayers' money for their own personal benefit.

Public service means just that, the role is for the benefit of the "public" not for the MP's personal gain.

The fact that neither she nor her leader seems to have got that point yet indicates a vast disconnect between some of those in Westminster and the voters.